W INTERNATIONAL ART PROJECT - Seung Yul Oh: SOOM: SITE II

SOOM: SITE II was a commissioned project for the Xinchang Fou+ Cultural and Creative Experience Centre, in the Xinchang Ancient Town, Shanghai. Monumental Culture Company was appointed to oversee the commission and manufacture of an artwork that celebrated the opening of the Culture Centre and reflected the history, present, and future aspirations of the Xinchang Ancient Town, a place steeped in over one thousand years of history.

Hutch Wilco and Zhang Ting were engaged to oversee the project, and chose Seung Yul Oh, the acclaimed Korean-New Zealand artist, to make a proposal for the site. This was the first time for Yul Oh to visit Shanghai. Before understanding the majesty and sophistication of this cosmopolitan city, he first encountered the gentle and moving history of the Xinchang Ancient Town, and was deeply impressed. Amidst the dragons and the arches of the stone bridges, Yul Oh immediately fell in love with the fengshui aesthetics and the storied history of this town, which had once been a coastal centre of salt production for Shanghai. In ancient times, deep circular pits adorned the countryside, where ocean water was deposited to evaporate, leaving behind the salt.

On learning the history of the town, and admiring the visual reflections of the many ancient dragon bridges, which create a circular impression in the negative space above the water and in the reflected space on the waters surface, Yul Oh proposed a second iteration of his SOOM work, SOOM, a specially commissioned work that was at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki's Edmiston North Sculpture Terrace in 2014.

At the planning seminar for the work (Soom means deep breath in Korean), Yul Oh mentioned that, "Soom means to breathe the breath of life, and it will activate the overall atmosphere of the new exhibition venue. The organic bubble forms that run through the space is not only in response to the ones that boiled when sea salt was cooked in ancient salt farms, but also corresponded to the perfect circular bridge arch formed by the reflection of the water surface of the ancient bridge in the water town".